


911, What's Your Emergency?

by Lanyare



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), The Usher Foundation (The Magnus Archives)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:42:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24300778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lanyare/pseuds/Lanyare
Summary: Statement of Jennifer Bastian, recorded at the Usher Foundation 25 May 2012, regarding an incident that occurred while she was working as a 911 dispatcher.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9





	911, What's Your Emergency?

**USHER FOUNDATION**  
**INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT ARCHIVE**

**ID:** A-INT2012073  
**Statement Given:** 25 May 2012  
**Transcription Completed:** 26 Jun 2012

 **Reporting Party:** Jennifer Bastian

[RECORDING BEGINS]

I'm pretty sure this is the most cliched beginning you get around here, but it's still true - I don't believe in the supernatural. Didn't. I guess. I'm still— I mean, it could just have been my imagination, right? Stress does that kind of thing to you, and heaven knows I had plenty of that over the years, I just—

Okay. Right, just facts. I know.

I got a job working for the dispatch center about, uh, nine years ago? I'd never been one of those people who always wanted to get into that line of work, in fact, the closest I'd ever come to considering it was watching that _Rescue 911_ show, back in the 90s, you know, with William Shatner? But after I'd been out of work a little longer than I'd expected after a round of layoffs at my previous job, I found the job listing on the city website and figured, well, I'd been working at a call center, so talking to people and typing should be nothing new, and I applied.

That's one of the biggest misconceptions out there, actually, judging from not just me but all the applicants we got who washed out within a couple weeks of starting the job. It's not just phone calls and typing, where the worst thing you get is screamed at because someone's internet isn't working. It's phone calls from people having the absolute worst day of their life, and you get to play witness to it while at the same time you have very little power to do _anything_ about it. All you can do is get help to them, but whether it's the right help or even gets there quickly enough to help, well, that's the kind of thing that sticks with you at the end of the day. And years later.

And the agency I worked for was small enough that we didn't have separate calltakers and radio dispatchers, like some places do. We did all of it, often in the same shift, since we'd rotate positions every few hours, so you could take 911 calls at the beginning of the day and then have the fire department yelling in your ear at the end of it. Or both. At the same time. 

Standard staffing during the day was to have four dispatchers on duty: one for non-emergency calls, one for emergency calls, one for main police channel, and one for secondary police channel. Since the fire department wasn't on radios unless they were on an active incident, the calltakers would just man their radio channel. And everyone was backup for everyone else, so, you know, if one calltaker was on a call the other one would pick up a ringing line, then the radio dispatchers would start to pick up if both calltakers were busy, and so forth. It wasn't unusual to have a phone call in one ear and radio traffic in the other and to be talking to both of them and typing notes in the CAD system at the same time.

As I said, though, that was standard staffing. Sometimes you'd have more scheduled, like Friday and Saturday nights would have up to six, and sometimes less, especially in the middle of the night during the week. Sometimes if we had enough dispatchers on staff we could get an extra one here and there for extra coverage, but of the years I worked there I can count the months we were at full staffing on one hand. If it got busy, well, you dealt with it. That was the job. You had to prioritize as best as you could. 

I think that's enough background to explain most of the story, but there's one other thing I need to mention, and that's pulling calls. You see, everything that came through the dispatch center was recorded. _Everything_. Every bit of radio traffic, every phone call— the phone lines started recording as soon as the call hit the 911 line, before a dispatcher even picked it up, and didn't stop even if it was on hold. We got some really amusing things recorded when people were on hold and didn't realize it was record— okay, yeah, that's not really relevant here, but, recordings. Everything could be accessed from a specific computer that was kept in a back room, I was told it was for, uh, security or something. Or they didn't want us pulling recordings at a whim and taking them home or whatever, because privacy and legal whatnot, so it had to go through specific people at a specific computer where everyone knew what they were doing.

Once a week one of the dispatch supervisors would go back into the room and pull requested recordings for the week. FOIA requests, requests made by police officers or fire personnel for their reports, even just pulling random calls or radio incidents to be used for trainings or review for "quality", some weeks there were only a couple things that needed to be pulled and some weeks the supervisor would be back there for a couple hours trying to find the right section of audio. So this usually happened during the day, but it was whenever it was quiet enough and we had staffing enough to cover for the supervisor being off the floor.

I mean, daytime was normally the more routine kind of stuff, plenty of traffic accidents and reports of crimes that had already happened, and lots and lots of non-emergency phone calls. You would not believe how many phone calls I took from people complaining about piddly shit—

Er, am I allowed to, uh, swear? I'm—

Yeah, anyway, daytime was usually a lot of Animal Control and parking issues and people mad that their neighbors were sunbathing in their fenced-in back yards, the nerve. Everyone wanted to work the weekend night shifts, that's when the _real_ fun happened.

Except when it didn't.

This day, the day I— I came here to talk about. It was one of those exceptions. 

It was a fairly quiet day, unusually cold for spring, so everyone was indoors. Dispatch was dead, without so much as a fender bender to occupy us from routine. It was the middle of the week, so with schedule overlaps we were up to five people on shift, and Sandra, the supervisor on duty that day, had gone back to pull calls about an hour before. It was apparently one of those days with a long list because there was still no sign of her. 

And then out of the blue, _every_ 911 line lit up, and the center went from absolutely silent to mass chaos in an instant. A tank truck coming off the freeway at the south end of town had lost control and plowed into the side of a hotel, a fire had broken out, and this being the middle of the afternoon, there was no shortage of witnesses all trying to report it at once.

I was on non-emergency phones at the time, and Bethany, on emergency phones, got someone on the line who was trapped in their hotel room so she couldn't just drop it to pick up another incoming call. I was covering for her as best as I could, Mary on secondary police radio was picking up what she could, and Erin on primary radio had to secure her channel for the officers dealing with the incident so she couldn't grab phones at all. And then the fire department got on their tac channel, and with the number of units responding for an active fire incident, _that_ radio was non-stop traffic. If we'd each had another set of ears and hands we still would've been swamped right then.

Now, Sandra was the supervisor, but with her off the floor, that left me as the senior on duty. And taking stock of the situation? I decided that we needed her help more than she needed to finish pulling calls. 

I— I don't know why, I'd never considered it before that day, but we _never_ interrupted the supervisor pulling calls. There wasn't any policy about it or anything, we just— didn't do it. I'm not sure why that day I decided it needed to happen, I'm sure there must have been any number of incidents that could've used another person. 

Or was there? I— I really can't remember, thinking back now.

That's not really what's important, though, what matters is that on that day, at that time, I decided to go call Sandra back onto the floor to help. I signaled to Mary to cover for me on phones, and Bethany met my eyes and pointedly turned up her radio speaker to show me she would listen to fire, and I ran to the back of the dispatch center.

I was too caught up in everything, too much in a hurry, to bother knocking on the door first— it was just the back room, not a private office or anything, so why would I need to? I just grabbed the handle and yanked it open, intending to just tell Sandra we needed her and then run back to cover my station. 

The words died unspoken as the door opened, though, and— I don't know how to describe it, not really. But everything inside that room— it was just a _room_ , with a table and chairs and some computer equipment, but everything, not just Sandra, somehow? Turned to _look_ at me.

It doesn't make any more sense when I say it out loud than when I see it in my memory, but that's what happened. The only eyes in that room were Sandra's pair, but the very air was looking at me. _Staring_ at me, affronted at being interrupted, intent, curious, their attention pressing against me in a disconcertingly tangible fashion, and absolutely impossible. Just as impossible as what I suddenly knew in that instant.

I say "knew" because it's the best word I've managed to come up with, because when I opened that door it was like, like in a movie where someone opens a door of a building on fire and the flames just _roar_ out as though alive. Out came a wave that just engulfed me in every single thing that had passed through the dispatch center in the last week. Every phone call, every crackle of radio traffic, even idle gossip between dispatchers and a phone call one of the cleaning staff had made on his personal cell while in the center. It was just _there_ , all in my head, inside— _inside me_ , like I was on both ends of every transmission or conversation, living rather than just reading the reports, I was every bit of it. 

I was the young mother begging between sobs for an ambulance to come for her baby, who'd gone down for a nap and was now blue and still. I was the dispatcher struggling to remain calm and steady as she typed in an address. I was the officer gasping broken directions into his radio as he chased a burglary suspect through a back yard. I was the paramedic watching her partner performing CPR as she updated their backup on the situation. I was—

I was everything. _Everyone_. I felt it all, I _knew_ it all, I _was_ it all, and I— that was the part— I— (unintelligible)

I— I _relished_ it. It felt. Good, like— like you didn't realize how hungry you were until you took a bite of food, and then it was like the best thing you'd ever eaten just because you _wanted_ it so much.

(deep breath)

It only lasted a second, but, _God_ , it was the longest second in my entire life— I blinked and everything was completely normal. Behind me was a cacophony of voices, crackling radios, the shrill tones of the 911 lines ringing, no time had passed at all. And Sandra was just giving me a startled look, one hand lifted to pull her headset off, just like someone who'd been unexpectedly interrupted in a completely normal activity.

I must have said something reasonable there, must have gone back to my station and done what needed doing. Nobody said anything to me if I didn't, if I'd acted at all different, and believe me, the dispatchers I worked with were never shy about calling you out if you weren't pulling your weight. I must have been relatively normal, doing my job, finishing the shift.

But when I signed out that day, I left my resignation on the lieutenant's desk. And I didn't go back. 

I couldn't bring myself to even work two more weeks. I couldn't bring myself to even _think_ about going back there. And I didn't. I made arrangements for them to empty out my locker for me and had a friend pick up the box. 

I can't— I can't go back there, not when I know it's— it's _aware_ of me now. It knows who I am, that I was there and I got its attention, and now I've left. And I don't think it likes that.

It's _watching_ for me. No matter where I am, no matter what I'm doing, I can still feel the pressure of that attention on me. I don't know what to do now, but I just can't— I won't go back to what my life used to be.

All those phone calls I took over the years, all the notes I logged, all the reports I wrote, every single word I spoke while within those walls, whatever it was, I was giving them to it. Feeding it. I thought— I thought I was doing something good, but— what was I _really_ doing?

(several seconds of silence)

I— that's all I have to say, I'm—

[RECORDING ENDS]

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] 911, What's Your Emergency?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25459297) by [murple](https://archiveofourown.org/users/murple/pseuds/murple)




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